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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Morytko who wrote (38983)	3/14/1998 2:48:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 61433

I wonder how many "cable LAN" (my own term as I don't know theirs) segments your ISP has and how many users on each? You mentioned that there is no problem in the local loop. If that's true you should be able to (assuming you have the 10Mb access) connect to an FTP server on the local loop in the dead of night and transfer a large file - say 10MBytes - and get nearly 10Mbps throughput. Do it 5 times. FTP server software is readily available on the net. ServU is very good for x86's. Steve, I have no idea how users the ISP has on each local loop. During the dead of night, I get about 8Mb access to the local server. I find many remoter servers slower. Typically 3Mbs. My guess is their servers are getting more hits and they do not have enough outgoing capacity. During peak times during the work days, 2Mbs is about all I get. I again to not know if the bottleneck is the server, the Sprint backbone or on the local loop. Also, your ISP should be able purchase service from MCI/UUNET (in addition to Sprint) if this is "not adequate". But it begs the question - when will the customer be satisfied? This is true. The problem is cost to the cable company and the ISP. This is all they are willing to pay for bandwidth. Note there are three levels of service. I do use the highest. Your perception of slow may be quite different from the next guy and as your explanation indicates there may be bottlenecks in the Internet that are beyond the control of your ISP (slow links along the way to slow servers; slow servers (on fast processors) as a result of poor application implementation/design, I/O bottlenecks, etc. The challenge to the local network administrator is to make sure there is minimal contention in their portion network and then provide "reasonable" access to external networks all the while balancing subscriber costs and profits (are they possible?) - a real challenge for a small ISP. I believe this happens a lot. Especially if it is a popular site. A case in point is when Microsoft releases a new version of IE. The first few days throughput downloading the new version is 1.5-2 Mbs no matter which of the mirror sites one uses. A month or so later it moves to 5Mbs. Could be server, bandwidth, etc. Glenn